


I said get up

by irisdouglasiana



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, Season 5 compliant, ivar does not have a great time in this one, not season 6 compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 07:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21370612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisdouglasiana/pseuds/irisdouglasiana
Summary: Ivar goes to visit the seer, and in the darkness of that small hut, the seer reveals to him many truths.The first truth is this, he says:your mother gave birth not to one monster, but many.
Relationships: Freydis/Ivar (Vikings) (background)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	I said get up

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Sometimes we haunt ourselves](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20155189) by [kingwellsjaha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingwellsjaha/pseuds/kingwellsjaha). 

> This story has the distinction of being inspired by kingwellsjaha's "Sometimes we haunt ourselves," which in turn was inspired by one of my own stories, "Everything changes, everything stays the same," but weirdly enough, while this story is compliant with kingwellsjaha's story, it's _not_ compliant with my own work.

_Ivar goes to visit the seer, and in the darkness of that small hut, the seer reveals to him many truths. _

_The first truth is this, he says: your mother gave birth not to one monster, but many._

**

After Ivar has taken Kattegat from Lagertha and the celebrations are over, he goes by himself to the shed behind the great hall where they had put his mother’s things after she had been killed. Some part of him is relieved when he opens the door to see the ten wooden chests sitting on the floor and covered with a layer of dust; to know that Lagertha, in the end, had not gone pawing through Aslaug’s clothes and jewelry and given away the spoils to her friends or worn them herself. Lagertha claimed his mother was a witch and so her possessions were likely cursed and it was better not to touch such things, but he knows that if she had truly believed that, then she would have burned the chests and not left them sitting there—for the power of a curse does not fade over time; if you do not banish it once and for all it will transform itself before your eyes, it will branch out in every direction and multiply, it will settle into the crevices of your house and worm its way into your dreams at night.

No, he thinks, it was not fear of a dead woman’s curse that made Lagertha move the chests of clothes and jewelry to another room. It was shame. She looked inside those chests and understood that she was not taking back something that had always been hers by right: she was instead taking the life her husband’s second wife had built for over two decades, and all her accumulated hopes and resentments and fears. No wonder she had not wanted to look at them too closely. No wonder she wanted to keep them locked away in the dark.

But he opens them then, one chest at a time, and watches the dust float away and settle back down. He pulls out his mother’s dresses and runs his hands along the embroidered edges and touches her furs and her jewelry, and in the end he picks out three things—a delicate comb carved from seashell, a pair of silver earrings set with sapphires, and a heavy gold necklace with a pendant in the shape of a wheel. His mother’s clothes will have to be tailored to fit, as Aslaug had been an especially tall woman, but the comb and earrings and necklace he can give to his bride without needing to wait.

After he finishes going through Aslaug’s chests, he sees a smaller chest in the corner that had escaped his notice earlier—just plain unembellished wood, tucked away underneath a pile of rugs. Something about it is oddly familiar. He shoves aside the rugs, pulls the chest closer to him, and pries it open, and then he quickly slams it shut again, because inside are all of Sigurd’s things, his shirts and his trousers and his favorite knife and his lute and the little wooden horse he had played with as a child, the one Floki made for him and—

His first instinct is to burn the whole chest. Instead, he holds his breath and opens it a second time. He takes out the knife sitting on top—_Father gave me this knife_—and feels the weight of it in his hands. He thinks about taking it for his own. He is king, after all, and no one will stop him if he wants to have it; nobody will say _that isn’t yours_. But in the end, he puts the knife back and closes the chest and shuts the door to the shed firmly behind him, as though those thin walls can somehow keep Sigurd’s ghost contained, and then he goes to Freydis and presents her with his gifts. She lets out a small gasp, momentarily speechless, and then she takes the necklace and places it around her neck and turns around so he can clasp it, and he thinks to himself, _I will remember this; I will remember the sound of that gasp for as long as I live_. He does not say anything to her about the chest with his brother’s things. He does not say anything about his brother at all.

(He thinks of those chests again much later, after he has been driven out of Kattegat, and he wonders if they are still sitting in that same place where he left them. He suspects not—Bjorn has no reason to fear Aslaug’s ghost as Lagertha had, and so Ivar imagines that he has given her jewelry to his new wife, the gold necklace with the pendant and the sapphire earrings and the seashell comb. Perhaps he has given the rest of her things away to his allies, whose friendship undoubtedly comes a high price. Perhaps he has given Sigurd’s toy horse to one of his own children and his clothes to a favored servant. Perhaps he is keeping the knife for himself, for it was well made, and after all it had once been their father’s.

And perhaps Bjorn has put all of Ivar’s things in wooden chests and taken them out to that same shed. Perhaps he has closed the door and turned the key in the lock and walked away without looking behind him in the vain hope that maybe, just maybe, that will be enough to keep all his ghosts inside; the living and the dead alike. But Ivar knows Bjorn is mistaken if he believes he can turn his back on his ghosts: eventually, they will come and settle outside his own door and knock and scratch at the wood. Eventually, they must be let in.)

* * *

_The truth is that you killed your brother because you hated him._

**

He tells Freydis things about himself, bit by bit, maybe more than he should, but when he is with her, he always feels the urge to share things he has never told anybody before, to explain, to mitigate. His absent father and protective mother, his rivalry with his brothers, his pain-wracked childhood, his anger at the gods for making him the way they did. He tells her how he never meant to kill Sigurd and she listens without interrupting or turning away in disgust or disbelief. _I did it, but it was not my fault. It cannot be my fault._

When he is finished, she squeezes his hand—the hand that had thrown the axe—and she tells him gently but firmly that it must have been the will of the gods, and he can’t stop himself; he breaks down sobbing in relief.

He has everything he wants now, or very nearly. He is king, he has a wife, he will be a father soon, his enemies are on the run. And yet his sleep is restless, filled with half-dreams that slink through his consciousness like phantoms, there and gone in the blink of an eye. He takes his crutch and lurches to his feet and then the ground shifts underneath him and crumbles into dust; he falls and falls. He wakes in the middle of the night to see Sigurd standing at the foot of the bed with an axe. After a moment he realizes it is not so; it is just the way the moonlight casts shadows through the window. Still, he turns to Freydis, sleeping peacefully at his side, and he holds her a little tighter, as though she can somehow protect him, anchor him, keep the earth underneath him solid for just a little while longer.

But he cannot cheat his fate forever, can he? The gods can be bargained with, they can be tricked, they can even be persuaded to an extent, yet in the end they demand their payment anyway. So it must be fate: on the verge of the final victory, he finds himself lying on the floor of the great hall with his strangled wife limp in his arms, the bones of their son in a tiny box in the next room, his brothers howling for his blood just outside, everything that the seer foretold become reality—and even as he makes his escape with the pitiful remainder of his supporters, he still cannot see it, he cannot understand how he got from there to here and why the gods hate him so.

_You’ll die,_ his mother told him with tears in her eyes before he left for England with his father. But it wasn’t so; Ragnar had pulled him out of the waves and dragged him onto the beach and he coughed up seawater and lived.

Now, as the sun sinks below the horizon that first night after losing Kattegat, he lies alone on the straw and the cold creeps into his bones. He dreams of drowning, of the ocean itself wrapping her hands around his neck and crushing his windpipe and pulling him down into the darkness, and he wakes up gasping for air.

_You’ll drown_, his mother said. She hadn’t said, _you will drown a hundred miles away from the sea. _She hadn’t said, _it will take a very long time._ Perhaps she didn’t have the heart to tell him that.

**

Two days later, the cart he is sitting on hits a rough patch and he suddenly loses his balance and falls. He lands painfully on his back, knocking the air out of his lungs.

A couple of the men walk by him while he is lying there stunned and coughing up dust. They look down at him and laugh. Then they keep walking.

**

After that, it is only a matter of time before they beat him.

Ivar has been in plenty of scraps before, especially with his brothers; he is no stranger to a bleeding nose, broken bones, bruises and cuts. He knows how to take a punch and how to use whatever he has at hand to even the odds. But it is different this time; these are not his siblings and this is not the kind of roughhousing he grew up with: his companions on the long road east beat him because they can, some of them warriors who followed him as far back as York—four men kicking him and slamming him on the ground and laughing. They don’t care if he once led armies and they don’t give much of a shit anymore about whose son he is, and why should they? When they look at him now, they don’t see a god, or a king, or even a man, really: they just see an easy target. They like it when he fights back, and he always, always fights back. They kick harder.

Afterwards, when he is curled up on his side and choking back sobs of rage and humiliation, that is when his dead brother comes to him, squatting on the ground and watching him with empty eyes. His own eyes, of course, are drawn to the gaping wound in Sigurd’s ribcage; his shirt stained almost black with blood. “Stop crying,” he expects Sigurd to tell him, just like that time many years ago when he had broken a bone in his leg—he couldn’t have been older than five—and he had been crying from the pain. Aslaug had left for a moment to bring him some medicine that would help him sleep, and in that space between her leaving and coming back, Sigurd had come into the room and stared at him. “You’re such a baby,” he had hissed, his face just inches away from Ivar’s. “Stop crying.” Then he slipped away before Aslaug could catch him.

Later, after Ivar had healed, he snatched the stool out from underneath Sigurd and smashed the back of his head with a bowl until Ubbe pulled him away. The blood had streamed down Sigurd’s face and he had cried. (_Who’s the baby now, huh? Who’s the baby now?_)

(There had been another time, however, when he had gone with his brothers to a secret waterfall that Ragnar had once told Ubbe about. Ubbe had carried him on his back through the woods, the four of them teasing each other as they turned off from the old deer path and picked their way down the slope towards the sound of running water. The trees down at the bottom of the canyon were so dense they blocked out almost all the light from the sky above, and the shrubs grew so thick they had to fight their way through the brambles until finally the clearing opened up and the waterfall and the shallow pool were right in front of them, the light bouncing off the water and making it shimmer and dance. There are places in this world that the gods themselves have touched, and anyone with eyes could see that this was one of them.

They stood there in silence for a moment, and then Ubbe put Ivar on the ground and he and Hvitserk and Sigurd shed their clothes and waded into the pool, splashing each other and taking turns standing underneath the falls and yelling as the water cascaded down on their heads. Ivar had sat there and watched, and he felt the usual surge of envy and resentment, to have come all this way and then be left out once again.

To his surprise, Sigurd had turned his head and looked his way. Without saying anything, he waded back to the shore, and with one fluid motion he picked Ivar up and carried him on his back into the water and then ducked under the falls. The coldness of the water came as a shock, the sudden pressure on his head and shoulders, and he let out a shout of delight. When they came back out from under the waterfall and Sigurd had set him down on the sand and collapsed beside him and they both had laughed, it was as though a new world had emerged, something brighter and sharper around the edges. Then Ivar blinked and it vanished.)

In the present, he searches Sigurd’s face for gloating but he doesn’t see it. He wonders if Sigurd still hates him. It is not a question that he is ready to put into words just yet, and so he doesn’t. His dead brother doesn’t tell him to be a man. He doesn’t tell him anything. He just stays there, squatting at his side with that same unreadable expression, until Ivar finally rolls over onto his stomach and pushes himself up on trembling arms and crawls away.

* * *

_The truth is that your father used you for his own ends._

**

He kills one of the men who like to beat him. He doesn’t think about it. He just does it. After the latest beating is over, or nearly so, the man kneels down beside him and grabs his hair to get in one last punch, and Ivar grabs the man’s dagger out of its sheath and stabs him in the neck and manages to stab a second man in the thigh before he gets a solid kick to the head that makes the world go black for a few seconds. It’s just long enough for the others to wrest the knife away and shove him face-first into the dirt, a boot planted firmly on the back of his neck.

Some of them want to kill him right then and there, and a part of him thinks, _good_. Others argue that they should sell him to King Harald, as he may yet command a high price, but then they cannot arrive at a satisfactory conclusion about how to split the reward. The argument ends up dragging on well past dark, and eventually they take him and tie him to a tree, still covered in the other man’s blood.

He expects to die in the morning. He doesn’t. Instead they cut him loose and ride off and leave him sitting there up against the tree with just the clothes on his back, and he watches in despair as the last of the caravan shrinks and disappears beyond his line of sight. The last town they passed was perhaps ten miles away, if not more, and Kattegat much further away than that: by now, he thinks Bjorn will have torn down all his banners and chopped up his throne for firewood and buried the dead wife he left behind him—buried her with every honor afforded to a queen, with a slave or two to attend to her needs in the next life. After all, they could not have won without her.

But that knowledge does little to help him now. For all he knows, the next town could be just over the hill or it could be fifty miles from here. And then, even if he does make it to the next town, well…he can’t think much past that point as to what he would do after that. Seek revenge against his brothers and Lagertha, somehow: his whole life has been an exercise in retaliation; he hardly knows how to do anything else. He doesn’t know who he would be without it. If he would be anything at all.

The dead man’s blood is sticky on his hands and his face. He closes his eyes and leans back against the tree, letting the sun warm his skin, and he thinks about dying. When he opens them again, Ragnar is looming over him and nudging him with his foot. _Get up, boy._

_How, Father? I can’t walk._

Ragnar lets out a huff of laughter. _Did I tell you to walk? Did I tell you to run? I don’t care how you do it. I said get up._

“Fuck you, old man,” Ivar tells him tiredly. _Fuck you for leaving, fuck you for coming back, fuck you for dying when I still needed you._ But he gets up; he rolls himself over onto his hands and knees and starts to crawl. He hears his father’s footsteps from behind him and the crunch of gravel under his feet as he drags his aching body along the road towards the unknown, and in a strange way he is glad for it—glad that in this moment, he is not entirely alone.

The gravel road is hard on his knees and his hands start to bleed before long. He ignores it and concentrates on pulling himself forward. Whatever else happens, he tells himself that he will not die here. He will not wait for death, but he will let it follow him if it likes: walking in his shadow, crawling along behind him, wiggling around in the dust like a snake down this long road to nowhere.

* * *

_The truth is that you do not love your wife. How could you? You don’t even know her._

**

He is found, eventually, by a farmer and his wife; an older couple riding on a cart pulled by the most ancient donkey he has ever seen. The man tugs on the reins and brings the donkey to a stop when they see him waving, and they peer down at him with puzzled expressions.

“Who are you? What is your name?” the farmer asks.

He answers without thinking. “Baldur.”

“Baldur,” the farmer repeats, eyebrows raised, and Ivar can tell that he is thinking about Odin’s son, beloved by all, fairest and most perfect among the gods—_that_ Baldur—and comparing him to the man sitting on the ground in front of him.

“Yes,” Ivar says quickly. He remembers Ragnar speaking to him outside Ecbert’s gates all those years ago, telling him the role he needed to play, and he gives the farmer and his wife his most helpless and winning smile before launching into a completely implausible story about how he ended up alone on the road and miles from any town in the first place.

There is a lengthy pause once he has finished. The farmer and his wife look at each other and he wonders if they will call him a liar and move on without him. “Are you hurt?” the wife finally asks.

“What? Oh.” He has forgotten that he is still covered in another man’s blood. He glances down at his stained shirt and then back up at her. “…It’s not mine.”

Even as he says it, he knows he probably should have said something else, but in the end they allow him to haul himself up onto the back of their cart and they take him to their homestead. They don’t speak much or ask him more questions along the way, which suits him well. When the wife sets down a bowl of stew in front of him he suddenly remembers his hunger and eats so quickly that she even chides him to slow down, but then she offers him a second serving anyway. He watches from the corner of the room as his hosts clean up afterwards, how smoothly and comfortably they move around each other, and he feels a surge of envy because he will never have that again. (_You made your choice; now live with it,_ Freydis whispers in his ear, and her voice is hard and pitiless.)

Once they are finished clearing away the table and the farmer has gone out to chop firewood before the sun goes down, the farmer’s wife brings Ivar a basin of water and a basket with bandages. It stings a little as he sponges the blood off his face and he can already tell that one of his eyes will be swollen shut by morning. He tends to his scraped and bleeding knees himself, but he lets the older woman bandage his hands, which are all cut up from the rough road. She is uneasy in his presence, as wary as a stray cat, and she will not meet his eyes. It pleases him to see that he is still feared, even now.

She takes the basket and stands up when she is finished. “My husband will take you to the town tomorrow morning and we will not see each other again,” she says quietly. “I hope you will remember this later.”

He lifts his head and looks at her. There is something in her posture and her way of speaking that reminds him of his mother, though of course they had nothing in common, his mother the queen and this peasant woman whose name he doesn’t even know. Still—if she knelt down and took his hand and promised him that everything would be all right, as his mother used to do when he was a child—if she did that, in this moment, he knows he would fall apart completely. He is immensely grateful when she instead turns away and leaves him sitting there on the straw pallet that will serve as his bed for the night with only his thoughts for company. He settles in and shuts his eyes and tries to will himself to sleep, but his mind continues to work despite his exhaustion.

He wonders if his brothers sleep soundly at night; he wonders who haunts their dreams. Do they dream of their dead wives and dead children? Because they visit him in dreams, his wife who he murdered on the floor of the great hall, and his son who he left in the woods to die. He tells himself it was the will of the gods, because it is the only answer that will not destroy him completely.

Perhaps this, then, is Ragnar’s legacy: not farming settlements or thrones or heroic poems, but dead wives and abandoned babies and lost and angry little boys who grow up to become lost and angry men. They visit Ragnar’s sons in dreams, these wives, cradling their babies in their arms and gazing on in silence. Whoever she is, she is always young and beautiful; she did not live long enough to become old and gray. She was a princess, she was a slave; she had blond hair, she had brown hair; she was stabbed, she was burned, she was strangled. She never speaks, and she is useful in this way, because her silence allows the space to imagine forgiveness is possible. And that forgiveness, in turn, allows one to mourn for a little while and then move on.

And for the most part, for most of the sons of Ragnar, it is easy to move on. It is easy to forget.

But for Ivar? There will be no more wives, no more sons. He may yet be many things in the future—who knows, after all, what the gods have in store for him—but he does not think that _loved_ will be one of them. He falls asleep alone and when he wakes in the morning he is still alone. He turns over on his straw pallet, his face swollen and his hands and knees still stinging, and he weeps.

* * *

_The truth is that when your son arrives, you will not be strong enough to bear it, because you are him and he is you._

**

In the morning after breakfast, the farmer helps him up onto the cart, and they head east towards the town, as promised. The farmer’s wife watches anxiously as they leave her behind. She does not bid them farewell. She does not wave.

“I know who you are,” the farmer tells him once the homestead has disappeared behind a hill. His eyes are still fixed on the road ahead of them, and Ivar thinks for a moment of Ragnar, staring off into the distance at something only he could see. “We knew before you spoke a word. Even here, we have heard of the things you have done.”

He wonders what things they have heard about him—that he led the Great Army that sacked York, that he wrested Kattegat from Lagertha, that he killed his brother and murdered his wife and his child? Which version of Ivar the Boneless do they know? He hunches over, huddling into himself. “You could have left me there.”

The farmer turns his head and meets his gaze calmly. “I had a son, once,” he says. “He would have been about your age. And if it had been my son sitting alone on that road, I would hope that someone would stop for him. I would not want him to be lost.”

_I had a son, once, and I left him to die alone as I had been left to die alone._ Ivar swallows hard and forces the words back. He doesn’t trust himself to say anything; he doesn’t know what kinds of truths might spill out of him unbidden, and so they don’t speak again until they pass through the gates of the town and the farmer brings the cart to a stop in front of the great hall, far smaller than the one he grew up in back in Kattegat. “Here is where we must part,” the farmer tells him as he lifts him from the cart to the ground with a grunt. He clasps his hand and then lets go. “Be well. Baldur.”

_Wait_, Ivar thinks for a moment as the farmer climbs onto the cart and urges the donkey to turn back the way they came. _Wait_—and then what? Ask the man to take him back to the farm? He is not Ubbe, fascinated by dirt, absorbed by the need to fulfill the legacy of another man. His brothers first learned to crawl, then walk, then run, and only after they had mastered those things were they given toy axes and small bows and taught to fight. But for himself, he was born fighting; he killed men and raised armies and sacked English towns long before he took his first stumbling steps. He’s good at fighting. It’s the only thing he knows how to do.

He turns his head and gazes at the entrance of the great hall. In his mind, he sees himself crawling inside on his hands and knees, one eye swollen shut, wearing the clothes the farmer gave him. He sees every eye turning his direction; he sees the whole room falling silent and the earl himself leaning forward to listen as he speaks persuasively, passionately, even eloquently. At the end of it, they don’t laugh or kick him out. They murmur amongst themselves and then they let him stay. No, better than that—he raises a new army out of the dust, greater than the army he led in England, and he leads them to Kattegat to take back what had once been his.

It’s a fantasy, a dream; it’s all he has left. He looks once more to the farmer and his retreating back, and then again to the great hall. And he makes his choice.

* * *

_The truth is that you are a man. Make of that what you will._

**

Here is one way it ends: he dies, and his death is quiet and obscure. He doesn’t die on the battlefield. He isn’t killed by his enemies. He never gets to have his revenge against his brothers; indeed, he never sees them again, nor does he ever return home to Kattegat. He doesn’t die as a king. There is no glory attached to his death, no greatness. He leaves behind no wife and no children. He vanishes out of history. All that remains is a trail of destruction spanning three countries, the smoking ruins of cities, ragged survivors with wide and hungry eyes. Bodies in the streets, bodies in the fields, bodies on the floor of the great hall. A legacy.

Here is another way it ends: he lives, and this part of his life is not recorded in the sagas or retold generation after generation. It is not the life he had imagined for himself and it is not the life he wanted, but it is a life, with the good and the ugly and everything in between. Even after the worst days, even after the loneliest nights, he wakes in the morning and sees the sun rise, and he finds it is not so terrible after all. He carries the dead with him; he invites them in: _follow me, Father, follow me, Mother, brother, wife, son. Watch what I will become._

He lives, and it is the hardest thing he has ever had to do. He gets up again.


End file.
